Opera Lafayette Leonore Souvenir Program Book

Program Notes for Gaveaux/Bouilly’s Léonore, ou L’Amour conjugal

By Julia Doe Léonore, ou L’Amour conjugal, with a text by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly and music by Pierre Gaveaux, is one of the most famous pieces of lyric theater that virtually no contemporary audiences have ever witnessed. This opéra comique, which premiered at the Parisian Theatre Feydeau in 1798, is emblematic of a persistently neglected category of dramatic repertory – the dialogue opera of the French revolutionary period. It also, of course, provided the source material for an object of widespread renown and sustained scholarly fascination: Fidelio, the sole surviving (and much revised) opera of Ludwig van Beethoven. Bouilly and Gaveaux’s Léonore, ou L’Amour conjugal is thus a work with a uniquely bifurcated historical identity. On the one hand, its plot and musical idiom are tied closely to the time and place of its creation; it betrays a clear debt to the conventions of Classical-era opéra comique and to the specific political circumstances of the late 1790s. On the other hand, the opera’s abstract and broadly generalizable themes – of the strength of conjugal devotion and the necessity for rebellion against unjust persecution – would prove eminently adaptable, exerting an enduring hold on the popular imagination in France and throughout nineteenthcentury Europe.

Léonore, ou L’Amour conjugal was described by its librettist as a fait historique. The term refers to a sub-category of French opera developed during the final decades of the eighteenth century, featuring plots “ripped from the headlines” or otherwise based upon acts of contemporary heroism. In his (sometimes spurious) memoirs, Bouilly – a lawyer turned playwright – publicized the work by emphasizing its veracity. He claimed that the drama was inspired by an event that occurred during the revolutionary reign of Terror. While employed as a civil servant in central France, he had witnessed a “sublime deed of bravery and devotion by one of the ladies of the Touraine, whose noble efforts I had the happiness of assisting.” The details of the incident, while plausible, are impossible to verify. And it should be noted that the author’s own reputation stood to benefit in association with that of his theatrical doppelganger – if he “assisted” the efforts of a real-world Léonore, Bouilly implied that he himself served as the model for the libretto’s prime symbol of justice and authority, the benevolent minister Dom Fernand. Moreover, if Léonore, ou L’Amour conjugal contains a grain of historical truth, it simultaneously (and rather conveniently) exemplifies many of the most popular plot archetypes of contemporaneous French theater. The theme of dramatic rescue from captivity was unsurprisingly ubiquitous in the years surrounding the fall of the Bastille, as was the dramatic condemnation of arbitrary tyranny. (Prison scenes abound in works of the period, from Monsigny’s Le Déserteur to Dalayrac’s Raoul, Sire de Créqui. The evil Dourlinski in Cherubini’s Lodoiska is but one obvious predecessor to power-mad villain Pizare in Léonore, ou L’Amour conjugal.)

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